Your Website & Facebook

Last night mimo (AKA Brent) spoke at the Park Slope Civic Council’s ‘Growing a Business’ initiative at the Montauk Club in Park Slope. Here’s the notes we put together for the event and some thoughts that came afterward.

Your Website

Matt Mullenweg (The creator of WordPress) had this to say about publishing your own content on a website or blog vs using Facebook and Twitter:

Blogging (with WordPress) is the natural evolution of the lighter publishing methods — at some point you’ll have more to say than fits in 140 characters, is too important to put in Facebook’s generic chrome, or you’ve matured to the point where you want more flexibility and control around your words and ideas… Different mediums offer different messages.

The most important part of the quote above (to us) is: (your message) is too important to put in Facebook’s generic chrome … Having a website/blog lets you brand your ideas in a way that you can’t on social media sites, if you don’t spend time/money on that brand, your image is less likely to be taken seriously.

WordPress has become (by far) the most popular Content Management System for making websites. It’s literally a joy for web developers to make templates for this system, you can have any look imaginable, and it’s not a pain to implement it.

How important is Facebook?

We’ve been integrating Facebook ‘like’ buttons and links to Facebook & Twitter pages into all designs for a while now. Facebook has become a part of nearly every business’ marketing strategy and it’s for good reason. Google Trends, a service that shows search volume worldwide, shows that the activity for facebook is MUCH higher than Twitter. The top part of this graph shows the search activity of both:

I’m not trying to say that you shouldn’t be using Twitter, just that you absolutely need to be using Facebook. Twitter has it’s place and connects you to different people.

Change Your Workflow

You need to find a way to effortlessly integrate social media into your everyday routine.

You have a blog, you have a Facebook account, you have a Twitter account… there’s not really much of a point to have all these things if they’re just going to accumulate digital dust…

A few suggestions:

If you find yourself taking notes on paper or in text documents in your computer that somehow relate to your business, change over to writing them as blog posts. The benefit of this is that they will be archived automatically so you can search for them later, you’ll also be able to drive more traffic to your site because these posts will have keywords in them that are relevant to your business. Also people might comment on them and you’ll make new connections.

Look at your Facebook wall EVERY DAY as part of your routine. Find ways to connect with people through your posts. If you’re not finding this easy to do, keep at it or have someone else at your business keep up with it, no excuses.

You should link up your Blog and your Facebook account so when you publish a blog post it automatically shows up on Facebook.

Someone had a good question last night which was hard to answer and has been sticking with me:

How do you know if you’re posting too much or being annoying to people…

It’s a legitimate concern. If you feel like what you’re writing is going to annoy people you’re probably right. It takes a certain skill to be able to talk about yourself and your business so if you don’t have it you should hire someone to do your PR person, this could even be new junior level employee you already have.